Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations that are capable of wireless communications such as simple cellular telephones, so-called smartphones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities.
Bluetooth refers to a very-short range (typically less than ten meters but sometimes effective up to thirty meters) two-way wireless communications protocol administered by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group and operating in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) radio band. So-called classic Bluetooth refers to the protocol and specifications defined as IEEE Standard 802.15.1-2002 (the full contents of which are incorporated herein by this reference) with many later versions of Bluetooth (such as Bluetooth V2.0 and V3.0) being backwards compatible with that original standard.
Classic Bluetooth requires an established Bluetooth communication link to remain active even when the device is itself otherwise inactive. The standard does permit the Bluetooth link to assume one of three different sleep modes to help conserve battery power, but these modes do not permit sufficient battery conservation for all application settings. Bluetooth Low Energy is an alternative to the Bluetooth standard protocols introduced in versions V1.0 through V3.0 and requires an entirely new protocol stack that support very simple links. Bluetooth Low Energy is designed to support very-low power applications that run using small power sources such as a coin cell. The technical specifications and requirements for Bluetooth Low Energy appear in the published version of Bluetooth V4.0 as released by the aforementioned Bluetooth Special Interest Group, this publication also being fully incorporated herein by this reference.
Although Bluetooth Low Energy offers considerable power-savings opportunities as compared to classic Bluetooth (hereinafter simply referred to as “Bluetooth” when presented without further leading or trailing modifiers), Bluetooth Low Energy is considerably less functionally and bandwidth capable than Bluetooth. Bluetooth Low Energy, for example, will not readily support voice applications.
Generally speaking, when two paired devices are both Bluetooth compatible and Bluetooth Low Energy compatible, they will preferentially communicate with one another via Bluetooth Low Energy rather than Bluetooth. In the alternative, that preference can be switched in favor of Bluetooth instead of Bluetooth Low Energy.